In light-frame construction, furring strips are long thin strips of wood or metal used to make backing surfaces to support the finished surfaces in a room. The term “furring” refers to the backing surface, the process of installing it, and may also refer to the strips themselves. Typically, furring strips may be laid out and secured perpendicularly to studs or joists, or simply set against an existing wall surface.
In metal framing systems, furring members are formed as generally U-shaped channels, which are often referred to as “hat channels”. The furring channels are typically secured to structural support members, such as studs, to serve as a mounting location for gypsum board, plywood, drywall, or the like. Such a furring system is widely employed in the construction of walls and ceilings, and have found particular use in sound isolation applications, wherein the finishing surface may be spaced from, and acoustically isolated from, the support framing.
In some applications, furring systems are employed to established curved wall and ceiling constructions. To accommodate the necessary furring channel bending, conventional approaches typically utilize a resilient furring channel material, or a furring channel with a sufficiently thin material gauge to render the overall structure suitably flexible to accommodate bending into a curved configuration. Currently available products, however, are either too flexible to support long-span bridging in large-scale construction projects, or are too inflexible to permit on-site bending, and therefore rely upon custom-bending from the manufacturer to meet specific curve criteria of the construction project. Conventional products, therefore, do not provide for furring channels that possess substantial structural integrity, while nonetheless being hand-bendable at the construction site to permit custom-curving by the installer.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a furring channel framing member that is sufficiently flexible to permit custom-curving of the member by an installer at the construction site. It is a further object to provide the furring channel framing member with sufficient material rigidity to establish a curved structural support member across relatively large spans.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a custom-curved furring channel framing member.